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Forget the Gators: Exotic Pets Run Wild in Florida

Burmese pythons are wrestling alligators in the Everglades. African monitor lizards, ill tempered and up to seven feet long, are splashing through canals in Cape Coral. Vervet monkeys hang around a car rental lot near Fort Lauderdale; South American monk parakeets wreak havoc on power lines; Cuban tree frogs have colonized everywhere, gobbling native frogs as they go.

The southern end of Florida, the most tropical state outside Hawaii, is teeming with exotic beasts. As if alligators, panthers and other native creatures were not enough, the steamy swamps, murky waterways and lush tree canopies here are a paradise for furry, scaly, clawed, fanged and otherwise off-putting things that have no business roaming this side of the equator.

''This stuff doesn't happen in New Jersey, it doesn't happen in Ohio, but in South Florida it happens constantly,'' said Todd Hardwick, whose trapping business, Pesky Critters, gets 60 calls a day from people with peacocks on their roofs, caimans in their driveways and iguanas in their tool sheds. ''Miami-Dade County is probably ground zero for exotic animals that are on the loose and doing very well.''

More imported animals are flown to Miami than any other American city but New York and Los Angeles. Breeders, dealers and owners of exotic pets abound. And when pet lovers find their boa constrictor or spinytail iguana has outgrown its cage, or they move or meet a mate who will not abide anteaters, piranhas or prairie dogs, South Florida presents the perfect dumping ground.

''Any place the public perceives as a large, wild, junglelike environment, that's where you'll see them,'' said Mr. Hardwick, who said he once caught a 22-foot reticulated python under a house in Fort Lauderdale, where it had retreated after swallowing a raccoon. ''Miami is a fast, disposable society, which means whatever is the hot pet today will be my catch of the day next week.''

Witness the Nile monitor lizard, dagger-clawed, blue-tongued and voracious. Monitors have multiplied so quickly in the maze of man-made canals around Cape Coral, a fast-growing city on the southwest coast, that a scientist at the University of Tampa won grants last year to study their ecological impact. Thirty-nine monitors have been caught and killed in the region since summer, said Kenneth Krysko, a University of Florida herpetologist assisting with the project.

''There's no question they are expanding their range,'' Dr. Krysko said. ''They are scaring the heck out of residents, there's no question about that.'' He said the lizards end up abandoned because many pet dealers do not warn buyers how big and difficult they get.

''Any child can go to a pet store and buy a hatchling for $10,'' Dr. Krysko said. ''It's really sad, because this is such a beautiful lizard, just a magnificent species. But no one realizes the ability this animal has to tear off your cat's head with one twist.''

Scientists say the lizards do not pose a danger to humans unless they are cornered.

Cape Coral residents also worry that monitors are eating the eggs of burrowing owls, an endangered species that nests in the ground and is abundant, and beloved, in the area. But Dr. Krysko said it was too early to tell, since scientists have not yet examined monitors' stomach contents (the captured lizards are in deep freeze for now).

While Florida has become hypervigilant about the spread of invasive plants and trees like Brazilian pepper and Australian pine, it has been slower to address the problem of non-native animals, said Skip Snow, a wildlife biologist at Everglades National Park.

''When you're talking about things that move around, it's harder to detect them and harder to do something about it,'' he said. ''There has not been an organized campaign to remind people it's not just against the law but terrible for the environment to release these things.''

Nor is the pet industry a reliable partner in controlling exotic animals, because many dealers are not knowledgeable, said Jim Stinebaugh, a federal wildlife inspector at Miami International Airport.

''Some of these folks were a manager down at Eckerd's and decided they could make a little more money selling exotic animals,'' said Mr. Stinebaugh, one of nine federal inspectors in Miami supervising up to 70 foreign shipments a day, some with thousands of animals. They turn back endangered species and other animals not allowed into the country -- if they spot them.

But they cannot keep out monitor lizards and other species known to make bad, though perfectly legal, pets. Mr. Stinebaugh sees monitors arrive almost weekly, and he said it was not uncommon to get shipments of 1,000 baby boas from Colombia or pythons from Indonesia.

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Everglades National Park -- 1.5 million acres of saw grass prairie, mangrove swamp and jungle -- has become a haven for Burmese pythons, which scientists believe are reproducing there. Other kinds of pythons, including the reticulated, ball and albino, have turned up there, too. So have boas.

The park has a python hot line, and it will soon distribute informational fliers about the snakes to visitors. Mr. Snow said people there had found all sizes of pythons in recent years, typically along roadsides but sometimes in the water. A tip last month led to the capture of six pythons sunning themselves along a levee, he said, though he added that park visitors need not be afraid of the snakes, which are not venomous.

''The concept people have of snakes hanging from trees and dropping into your boat to attack you, that's just not realistic,'' he said.

It is more likely that pythons could eventually displace native snakes. Mr. Snow said he had been heartened by reports that an alligator recently swallowed a python in the park -- a bone-chilling battle captured on film by stunned retirees from Wisconsin -- because it suggested that pythons, which have few predators, could perhaps be controlled.

Some of the exotic animals here were released or escaped from roadside attractions years ago, like the troupe of vervet monkeys that roams Dania Beach, near Fort Lauderdale. In 1992, Hurricane Andrew destroyed a number of research and breeding centers and a good portion of the Miami zoo, setting loose 5,000 animals, from baboons and orangutans to wallabies and capybaras, known to some as hog-sized rats.

Those still at large include macaque and capuchin monkeys, parrots and cockatiels, and lizards galore, said John West, a lieutenant in the wildlife investigations division of the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.

''We had one dealer lose almost 10,000 geckos,'' Lieutenant West said. ''You could look out across a tomato field and there would be a line of 100 macaques walking nomadically across the field, picking up fruits and vegetables.''

Mr. Stinebaugh, the airport wildlife inspector, is in a prime position to monitor exotic pet trends, and thus to predict which species will be turning up in the wild. Tarantulas are hot, he said, as are horned lizards from Vietnam.

It is harder to predict how exotic animals will affect the ecosystem. That can take decades to determine. Mr. Hardwick, the trapper, said it was clear that pythons and boas were displacing indigo snakes, and that parrots were competing with native owls and woodpeckers for tree cavities.

''Some of these battles we've already lost,'' Mr. Hardwick said. Green iguanas are now so common in South Florida that he has given up answering calls about them.

His favored solution? A good hard freeze, which many of the ''alien invader species,'' as he calls them, would be unlikely to survive.

But the last time that the mercury dropped below 25 in Miami was, well, never.

''Maybe in 200 years,'' Mr. Hardwick said with a sigh, ''we're going to be calling a lot more things native.''